As you will know by now, the Royal Mail Enquiry office on Cromwell Road, Whitstable, has finally closed. This means that many of you will be travelling to Canterbury to pick up your undelivered packages. However, there are a number of other options available, and you should have received a letter from the Royal Mail outlining these. As it says, you can have the item redelivered on a day of your choice, you can have it delivered to a local Post Office, subject to a small charge, or you can have it delivered to a neighbour. However, there is one … Continue reading No need to travel to Canterbury to pick up undelivered mail

As you will know by now, the Whitstable delivery office is due to close on the 20th May and the staff and service be relocated to Military Road, Canterbury. It will be a sad day for postal workers and for the town as one more vital facility is closed and shifted over to the city nearly eight miles away. However, the staff are sanguine about it. We put up a good fight, we held the company at bay for over three months and we won some important concessions along the way, with significant help from you, the public, who wholeheartedly … Continue reading The Closure of the Whitstable Delivery Office

As you will know by now, the post office in Gladstone Road, Whitstable is about to close. This will come as no surprise to people who use the facility regularly, as it has been abundantly clear for some time that it is being run down. There are hardly any leaflets available, there are no pens along the counter where the public queue, and nothing seems to be on sale any more. The whole office has a dreary and neglected air. This is only one of 70 post offices up and down the country that are due to close or to … Continue reading Post Office Closures and the Privatisation Agenda

I’ve just come back from watching a murmuration of starlings over Cromwell Road, Whitstable. “Murmuration” is the collective noun for a flight of Starlings. Starlings don’t flock, they murmur. It’s an odd word to have chosen, since what they actually do looks more like reciting poetry than murmuring. They cut, they weave, they parry, they thrust, they wheel about in the air forming immense patterns of startling complexity. They shimmer, they switch, they swirl. They swoop, they dive. They split and then reform. It’s like a vast aerial dance of hypnotic precision in which the individual starlings come together to … Continue reading A Murmuration of Humans

From the moment I came down Cromwell Road and saw the ingeniously altered For Sale sign outside the office (it now read “NOT For Sale”) I knew we were in for a memorable day. When I turned the corner from Cromwell Road into Wheatley Road, there were 20 or more postal workers lined up outside the gates, all of them in uniform, warming themselves on a brazier. I’d bought the brazier the previous day. I’d rung up Julie Wassmer asking her if she knew where I could get one. She didn’t quite understand. “Brazier?” she said. “What do you want … Continue reading Whitstable’s Carnival of Resistance

Ballot____________________________________________________________ Yesterday, Thursday 27th December 2012, around 15 postal workers abandoned their Christmas celebrations for a time to attend a union meeting to discuss the outcome of the ballot held earlier in the month about industrial action. This was called because of the Royal Mail’s refusal to institute a proper consultation about the closure of the Whitstable Delivery Office. To be clear on this point: the Royal Mail claim that consultation has taken place “at the appropriate level”. The “consultation” they refer to is the fact that they informed us that the office was going to close. There was never … Continue reading Why Whitstable Postal Workers Will Be Taking Action on January 12th.